This biting, humorous story is 85% true. I am the
character named Mark, and this is an example of a typical dinner at
my house, except for the father. I hope you enjoy it. Please send
feedback!

“Let us pray,” said Mr. Smith—“That
’s Officer Smith to you ”—of W. Cragapple Street.
Mark bowed his head and thought to himself, The curtain comes up.
“Lord, we thank You for this food. Let it fully nourish our
bodies with bounty and goodness. Thank You for bringing our happy
family back to this table again safely. Amen.” Dear
God. Bounty and goodness? Lord, that is such a stupid prayer and I’m
sorry You have to hear it every single night. But so do I. Amen.

Mrs. Smith passed around the beans, rice, and
corn to everyone, who took it silently and passed it silently and
started eating it—silently. Then Luke asked, “So do you
get a life sentence for spying?”

“Why? We serve the beans with a huge
spoon, so doesn’t it just make sense, ya know, that we’d
eat them with one?”

“No.”

“But—”

“No.”

Mark, with a high brows and piercing eyes, looked
over at Luke and whispered, “You ask that every night. What
makes you think that tonight (of all nights!) the planets are so
mystically aligned that the senseless iron slate of social etiquette
would have fundamentally changed to meet your pertinacious efforts? ”

“What’s that?” asked Mr. Smith,
slightly irritated by what little of Mark’s slightly
ostentatious, but rather precise choice of words he had managed to
hear. Mark had actually said pertinacious, and no son of Mr. Smith’s
was going to go around saying pertinacious. No siree.

“Nothing,” muttered Mark, his face
towards his plate.

Six more seconds of silence, and then—“But
what about if the CIA hires you to, like, I dunno, spy on Nebraska or
something?”

What? That’s one of the top 100
stupidest things he’s ever asked, thought
Luke’s big brother Mark. And it really was. It was actually the
45th stupidest thing that Luke Smith of W. Cragapple Street had ever
asked. (The second dumbest thing he’d ever asked was if Jimi’s
grandmother had ever had any kids; the number one, hands-down,
unmitigatedly stupid thing he had asked was how long Bill and Ted
Quincy had been twins.) Some people, especially encouraging
elementary school teachers, like to say that there is no such thing
as a stupid question. Luke was walking proof of that they were
wrong—dead wrong.

“We have the same President, Luke,”
said Mark, rather matter-of-factly, “It’s part of the
U.S.”

“Well, okay, but what about if you take out
their governor?”

“They don’t have a—”

“Will you stop!” exploded a
formerly bottled-up Mrs. Smith, holding her ears so that her brain
wouldn’t leak out. And it really might have had her hands not
been there. Honestly. “Why are you always picking on your
brother, Mark? And why are you always seeing how far you can push the
line, how much you can get away with, Luke? Are you planning some big
heist? What is it with all these questions!”

Mark sat and thought. He pictured himself—he
had to restrain himself from actually doing it—looking straight
into his mother’s eyes and saying, “But Mom, it’s
the Socratic method,” as seriously as he could. He started
laughing and half-choked on his milk. He got a glare from Mr. Smith,
who Mark proceeded to pick apart piece by piece.

Why does he wear his stupid badge to the
table? Why is he eating a million miles an hour? Why does he always
sound so stupid when he talks? And Luke—what? Just what! I
don’t even know what to say. He’s crazy. Everyday he
tells me all about his fantastic plans to leave the country before
high school, and everyday I tell him that he won’t and that he
doesn’t even speak Japanese, so why would he want to go—

“—Will you stop scraping your
fork?” glared Luke. Mark shrugged. He wasn’t scraping his
fork, at least purposely, and everyone knew it. Why would he scrape
his fork? Mark wasn’t a fork-scraper—if there is one
thing, one lonely, solitary thing that Mark was not, it was a
fork-scraper.

“I made an arrest today,” announced
Mr. Smith. Mark looked up, bewildered by the man who supposedly was
his father. It was a stupid thing to say; Mr. Smith was a cop who
arrested anyone who looked at him the wrong way, as far as Mark could
tell from the stories: just last week he successfully pulled over two
cars in eight minutes—one for driving three miles per hour over
the speed limit, the other for going nine under. Now, he couldn’t
technically make an
arrest for something as petty as that (he’d be hard-pressed to
even write a legitimate ticket), but he could if the driver got an
attitude. Which they did. And who blames them? Apparently Mr.—excuse
me, Officer Smith
does. So he arrested them and made then serve fifty-nine minutes,
fifty-nine point nine-nine-nine-nine seconds of jail time (which is,
naturally, the longest he can keep them in for “undermining the
judgment of an officer of the law”).

“Cool! Who?” asked Luke, suddenly
forgetting he was acting annoyed.

“Can’t tell you. Top secret.” He
was probably right. Suburbia was filled with so many of the FBI’s
most wanted, men who were, in fact, wanted in twenty-six nations plus
Antartica—maybe even Pluto, but who cares about planetoids?

“Awww, c’mon Dad!” Luke
bounced. This is such an idiotic charade. I
think I’m going to puke. Actually, I hope I’m going to
puke, because then I won’t have to sit through another round of
bad T.V. drama. Every night! And for the most
part, Mark was right. It wasn’t every night, but Mr. Smith was
on a 27-day streak of arresting someone (or, not infrequently, more
than one unfortunate person), then coming home and playing the game.
He would cast his fishing pole with the bait—“Arrested
someone today,”—then sit back and wait for a nibble—“Who,
Daddy, who!”—then play it cool, waiting to sink the hook
in deep—when Luke would start going crazy and making a
scene—and then he’d reel it in and tell some ridiculous
story.

“Nope, not gonna do it,” he said. But he
was. Oh yes, he was.

“PLEASE!” shouted Luke, who was
really acting like an idiot.

“PLEASE!” shouted Mark, who was
really acting like Luke, who was really acting like an idiot. Mark,
however, was not an idiot.

“Alright, alright. I’ll tell ya’ll,”
conceded Mr. Smith. “So there I was, just drivin’ the ol’
cruiser when wha’do I see? Two teenagers—skateboardin’!”
explained Mr. Smith, who then, as if there were nothing more to
explain, leaned back in his chair and surveyed the scene.

Mark just looked at him, slightly gaping.
“Skateboarding isn’t illegal you know,” he said,
and then quickly—before Mr. Smith could beat him to the
exception—blurted, “Where were they?”

“School parking lot,” countered Mr. Smith
in the exact same biting tone he used when he said, “King me.”

Mark considered. Perhaps there was some ordinance
deep within the caverns of City Hall—but arresting still seemed
harsh. It was. He stood up and carried his plate to the sink. He
said, as he walked out of the kitchen, “It’s been real;
it’s been good,” but it hasn’t
been really good and it hasn’t really even been good.

James K. South is an 18-year old writer from
Missouri. He is currently editing his second novel, The Lost, about
the nature, cause, and effects of gangs.